


Once upon a time on a moonlit night

by queen_ypolita



Category: Alexander Trilogy - Mary Renault
Genre: 100-1000 Words, Challenge Response, Community: maryrenaultfics, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-30
Updated: 2011-10-30
Packaged: 2017-10-25 02:29:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/270736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queen_ypolita/pseuds/queen_ypolita
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A statue comes to life outside a temple holding the remains of someone important.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Once upon a time on a moonlit night

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2011 maryrenaultfics Spooky Story challenge. This year's prompt was "unquiet dark".
> 
> This story was inspired by, and draws heavily on, _The Lost Tomb of Alexander the Great_ by Andrew Michael Chugg.

_A dream of a shadow // is our mortal being._

When I thought about afterlife during my lifetime, I thought about the Isles of the Blessed, and the pleasant times spent with music and conversation in the shade of green trees. Perhaps my spirit initially went there. After death, time and place feel different, and one moonlit night I opened my eyes and knew not where I was, or how long it had been since I had last felt conscious of where I was or how long ago that had been. I felt curiously stiff and heavy, and when I tried, I couldn't turn my head to take in my bearings. As strange and unnatural as it seemed, I had become a limestone statue, one of several grouped in a semi-circle formation. The moonlight was bright that night, but not quite bright enough for me to see the features of my stony companions clearly, but over the course of the endless days and nights that passed with no change to my condition, with nothing else to do with my time, I studied their carved features and found that I knew many, distinguished men as they had been.

I, however, appeared to be the only one who had somehow returned to this crude form of life where I had some use of my senses and was capable of thought, although my body was made of stone through and through, I couldn't open my mouth to speak and I could as little turn my head as I could stand up and walk away from my spot.

It was clear to me from early on that this was an important place, a sacred place. There were often living, breathing people milling about, some with regular duties who I soon came to recognise whenever they were within the field of my sight or the reach of my hearing. Others came to visit the site and were there one day, making a lot of song and dance about everything they could see. The semi-circle of statues that I was one of, stood outside a temple, near its entrance, and someone important was entombed inside.

It took me some time to understand that I found myself in Egypt, but the man inside wasn't a native of these parts, although his body, as far I could make out from conversations I overheard, had been preserved according to the Egyptian customs rather than put on a pyre in the familiar Greek way. He wasn't Greek either, but a Macedonian following in the footsteps of fabled heroes who had taken his army all over the Persian lands, and then died there, leaving his generals fighting endless wars over lands that they wanted for themselves but no one could govern as a whole. One of the generals had arranged for the body to be brought to Egypt where he had established himself, and there was more bloodshed over that act of theft. Naturally the snatches of conversation I had occasion to overhear painted the ruler of Egypt as the hero of the piece.

From what I could hear and see, there was no doubt that the ruler of Egypt was clever and cunning and making smart decisions about how to establish his rule, not just over people's bodies but their minds as well, working hard to build a connection to the last native ruler, his own house, and the renowned Macedonian whose remains lay in this temple, and intertwining the myths and legends of the Greeks with those of the Egyptians. In my stone semi-circle I was keeping company with Greek poets and thinkers, somewhere nearby they had sphinxes guarding the pyramids that were the ancient rulers' resting-places, and I thought that in another life I might have been part of his scheme, the poet to sing the songs and weave the tales about the heroes who we want ordinary people to remember. In this life, I was a mute witness, and I couldn't understand why.

Time went by, days and nights followed one another endlessly and I had no concept of time, the sun scorched the ground, the Nile flood came and went on the flood plains not far away, people came to visit the temple and went away. Nothing much seemed to change, the people were same, the temple was the same, statues near me were the same, mute and lifeless as ever.  
But the world will never stay the same for ever. I could barely remember a time when there hadn't been a group with tools working on some part of the site, including the temple I stood outside of, but this time it was obvious something larger was happening, measurements were being taken, the doorway examined, the walkway cleared out. Then the day came when they brought the sarcophagus out of the temple. The body was being moved, people were talking about this new temple in the new city at a site by the sea that the man had in his lifetime picked out and marked, and given his name to.

I didn't care to listen out for the details about the journey. After the body had gone, silence seemed to have fallen over the site, as if everyone left behind, those living and breathing and those made of stone, had lost their purpose. The temple wasn't closing, that I had understood, but it was clear that the main attraction was going, and this site would diminish in the minds of those seeking to get closer to the ancient glories they have heard so much about.

That night, clouds hid the moon and the wind carried desert sand. There was restlessness in the air which I couldn't place at first, but then thought it came from the sphinxes. I had never felt their presence before, so it was unsettling and not knowing what to do to shelter myself, I closed my eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> The poetry snippet at the beginning is, unsurprisingly, Pindar.


End file.
